


Reality, and Other Disagreements

by Just_A_Slug



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friendship, Gen, Original Character-centric, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV First Person, Rated teen for language, did I write this because I miss Washington?, first fic I publish and it would be for twilight huh, yes - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29671713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Just_A_Slug/pseuds/Just_A_Slug
Summary: I was not Isabella Swan, and I didn’t remember enough about her to pretend to be her convincingly. But teenagers changed a lot, and they changed quickly, and hopefully Forks would think that she had just grown into me. Hopefully.And I could pretend to be a teenager. I was only barely not a teenager myself. Hell, I’d even been seventeen less than three years ago. I could so pretend.So. I’d just have to roll with it. And try not to fuck up Bella’s life too badly.
Relationships: Edward Cullen & Original Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Reality, and Other Disagreements

I fucking hate LA. 

I drummed my thumbs on the steering wheel, glaring out into late afternoon traffic. The freeway might as well have been a parking lot for all I was going anywhere. Hundreds of cars stood like a flood around me, glinting dully in the dying light. Fucking LA. Fucking LA. I had a ten mile commute from my work to my apartment and it still took upwards of an hour to make the trip most days. That should have been illegal. It was, at the very least, immoral. 

I’d always been a city kid, and I had thought a lifetime in San Diego would be enough to prepare me for only four years in LA. I was wrong. 

Just have to get through college, kid, then you can get the hell out of here, I reminded myself. 

May he who decided to let public transit slide because ‘the car is the future’ rot in hell. 

The buzzing of my phone on my lap distracted me from my internal bitching. Julian, roommate number two of three, was calling. I answered, flipping to speaker and dropping the phone back onto my lap. 

“Yo,” I answered. 

“Hey, Corinth, you called the landlord three days ago, right?” Julian asked immediately. 

“Yeah?”

“And she was supposed to send someone up today, yeah?” 

“Uh, yeah. At like, one or something. I wrote it on the calendar.” 

I heard Julian moving from the other end of the line. “Yeah, it’s there,” he said after a moment. “1:30. I almost couldn’t read your handwriting. It’s just scribbles.” 

“Eat shit.”

“It’s true!”

“Eat shit!”

“No, but seriously. You sure she told you she was sending someone today? You didn’t write it down wrong or something?”

I rolled my eyes as I flicked on my turn signal. I had about half an mile to my exit, but it was borderline impossible to merge lanes any time after one in that section of the city. 

“I’m pretty damn sure,” I said. “She told me, 1:30, October 9th. And so I wrote down, 1:30, October 9th. I take it she didn’t send anyone.” 

“No. I made sure to be home, too. Not like I could have gone anywhere.”

“Could’ve gone grocery shopping. We need food.” 

“Ugh. It’s not like we can cook any of it.”

Julian had a point. Our oven and stove top burners had mysteriously stopped working five days previously. We had a microwave, and that was serviceable for most of our needs, but everyone was getting more than a little tired of sandwiches and cups of noodles. 

That all of us got damn good at cooking was perhaps the only good thing to come out of quarantine, and now we couldn’t even do that. Woe is us.

“Did you call her?” I asked. 

“I did,” Julian replied. “She didn’t answer. I left a message.” 

“Right. Chelsea’s the first landlord I’ve had. Are they all this shit?” 

“Mostly.” 

“Fucking brilliant.” 

“Eso lo que es. Can you pick up McDonald’s on your way back? If I have to eat another jelly sandwich I am going to die.”

“Then perish. Should’ve asked five minutes ago, man. I’m on our turnoff street.”

“Ugh. Why are you so useless.”

“Shut up. Call an uber or some shit if you don’t want to get it yourself.”

Julian clicked his tongue. “Bitch, you think I’m paying that? I’m broke.”

“Then get it yourself,” I said as I pulled into my parking spot. “I’m hanging up now.”

“I could call Liz-” 

Julian was cut off as I did as I promised. I turned off the car and grabbed my bag from the passenger seat before climbing the three sets of stairs to our shared, two bedroom apartment. It was a fine amount of space for the four of us: Liz, roommate one of three, Julian, Marisol, roommate three of three, and myself. 

I’d sort of lucked out in the roommate department. Liz, full name Elisa but affectionately referred to as our token cis, and I had been friends in elementary school, and we’d surprisingly ran into each other again in college. Julian was one of my coworkers, and had been neighbors with Marisol back when he was in middle school and her in elementary. Marisol, in turn, had been one of Liz’s TA’s.

It was all a surreal case of it’s a small world, but we got along surprisingly well. The shared space didn’t feel as cramped as it could have, with them. 

Though, it was even less cramped than usual lately. Marisol had been out of town for about as long as our oven had been out of commission. She had had to fly back to Texas to take care of her younger sibling a week ago when her mother was hospitalized. Had to love covid.

It took me a second to wrestle with the keys- the door’s lock was sticking again- but I made it into the apartment without issue. Julian was sitting cross legged on our garbage-picked sofa. It was an ugly thing, off white with thick blue stripes and horribly lumpy. But it was free and didn’t smell, so it was perfectly serviceable in our books. 

Julian, even in proximity to the couch, was not ugly. He was tall, and he had thick hair, dark eyes, and a bright smile. The pencil mustache he was trying to grow wasn’t doing him any favors, but still, he was a good looking guy. He was a bit of a catty bastard, but being blessed with good looks and a charming personality might be too much to ask. 

He didn’t look up from his phone as I shut the door behind me. “I’m texting Liz my McDonald’s order. She's much more useful than you. You want anything?” he asked.

“Uh, sure. Kids meal, cheeseburger, apple slices,” I replied, walking into our tiny kitchen and dropping my backpack onto one of the chairs surrounding the island. 

I heard him snort behind me. “How old are you?”

“Fuck off, I want my apple slices. Be sad with your fish sandwich.”

“I’m getting a chicken sandwich this time.” 

“Exotic. Do you want any tea? I’m making some.”

“We have any of that lemon stuff left?” 

“Yeah.”

“Then sure. Put some sugar in it this time, though!” 

“Nasty!” I called back to him as I filled the electric kettle with water. I heard him wander into the kitchen area as I prepared the mugs. I turned to look at him, finding him leaning against the kitchen island with a contemplative look on his face. 

“You think you could fix the oven?” 

I snorted and turned back to the tea preparation. “No.”

“Aren’t you, like, an engineer or some shit? Shouldn’t you be good at fixing things?” 

“I’m an aerospace engineering student. I’m learning how to do math about planes. Ovens are not in my purview. Hell, fixing things isn’t really in my purview.” 

“You fixed my car,” he countered. 

“Your car needed an oil change. And besides, the only reason I know jack about cars is that I’m driving a thirty year old mess. I need to know shit about cars.”

Julian sighed. “And now we need to know shit about ovens. I really want to bake something.” 

“Truly a tragedy.” I turned back to Julian and handed him a steaming mug of lemongrass tea. “Put sugar in it yourself.” 

He pouted but took the mug. “You like my baking.” 

“Everyone likes your baking.” 

“Yeah, it’s because I’m good at baking. And we’d have some of my yummy, yummy baking if someone would fix the oven.” 

“Take it up with Chelsea.” 

“I did, but Chelsea is the mother of all flakes,” Julian exaggerated his pout, clearly going for some semblance of puppy eyes. “If we only rely on Chelsea, we’ll never get our oven back. And then where will we be?”

“Ovenless,” I said flatly. “If I take a look at the oven, will you stop bugging me?” 

He grinned. “Yes.” 

I rolled my eyes and set my own mug of tea down on the counter. “Fine! You’ve worn me down, congrats.” 

“You’re the best, Corinth!” he sing-songed. 

“Yeah, whatever. I’m not going to be able to fix the damn thing,” I muttered to myself. I fully intended to make a show of looking at the oven. Flip all the switches, open the door and look around inside, maybe take the stove top apart just a little bit. Peer around, grumble to myself, and profess it a job above my skill level. Maybe Julian would drop the issue if I actually demonstrated my complete lack of kitchen appliance know-how. 

The man in question hovered at my shoulder as I regarded the oven. “Is it telling you it’s secrets?” he asked with faux solemnness. 

“Yes, it’s whispering sweetly to me,” I replied with equal gravity. “Guess we should check if the gas is even on.” 

“Seems a good place to start,” he said.

I turned one of the dials on the oven. The stove clicked. No flame was produced, and I couldn’t smell any gas. Right, well, that’s helpful. Maybe the oven itself? I turned the oven on and adjusted the temperature to the range of three hundred degrees. 

The oven made a shuddering sound. Suddenly, I could smell gas. 

“Oh, that can’t be good,” Julian commented. 

“No,” I agreed. “Let’s stop poking at this? We should probably stop.” 

“Oh, yeah, probably.” Julian nodded from the corner of my vision. 

Right. Right! Ovens: definitely above my skill level. 

I reached out a hand to turn off the oven. My hand touched the dial. There was a tell-tale click-

And then-

And then-

And then something must have happened-

But-

But there was--

Nothing---

And then-

And then----- --

And------ -- ----

\---- -

-

The alarm woke me up. I opened bleary eyes into the dim light of early morning and shrugged off the lingering edges of a dream. The alarm continued blaring, and I groaned, turning over in my bed towards the bedside table and slapping out a hand. It hit an alarm clock. Not my phone. I blinked.

Where the fuck’s my phone?

I blinked again.

Or, more pressingly-

The hand resting uselessly on top of the alarm clock wasn’t my own. It was thinner, paler, with shorter fingers and a more delicate wrist than my own hand.

I then realized that I, A, did not recognize the room I was in, and, B, did not recognize the hand I placed on the bedside table. Otherwise known as the hand attached to me.

What in the-

I could see hair hanging out of the corner of my eye. It was darker than it normally was, thinner than it normally was, and longer than it normally was. It caught on my clothes- fucking pajamas, like, actual fucking pajamas what in the fuck- and tugged on my scalp as I turned my head. I gathered it quickly, resisting the urge to pull it out, pull it out, get it off, get it off, get it off-

The pain brought back a modicum of clarity. I forced myself to drop the fucking hair. My fists instead clenched the sheets of a bed I didn’t recognize hard enough to make my fingers hurt. Deep breath, c’mon, deep breath. My lungs shuddered in my chest. 

The alarm clock was still blaring. I tugged it’s power cord out of the wall. It went silent. 

Ok. So. My hair was longer. I was in a bedroom I didn’t recognize, was wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, had hands I didn’t recognize, and hair I did not recognize. Sure. Sure! I was dreaming. Had to be. I hadn’t had a lucid dream in a hot minute, but stress did weird things to a person! Yes. 

Dreaming. 

I carefully unclenched my fist, carefully smoothed the sheets, and carefully made sure my hands did not shake. That’s all this was. A weird, stress induced, lucid dream. Right. Time to wake up.

I tapped out a count on my fingers. Thumb to pointer, thumb to middle, thumb to ring. Thumb to pointer, thumb to middle, thumb to ring. 

The count went through, and my fingers- which weren’t mine these weren’t my hands why aren’t they my hands- remained in perfect order. Consistent. Which couldn’t be true. Dreams weren’t consistent, sleeping brains couldn’t maintain a consistent count. But I had to be sleeping. 

So I tried again. 

And then repeated it for good measure. And then again. 

Thumb to pointer, thumb to middle, thumb to ring. One, two, three. One, two, three. 

The room remained stubbornly alien around me, and my hands remained stubbornly normal and not mine. 

Well. That didn’t work. 

Right!

Time for the good ol’ fashioned way, then. 

I pinched my arm. No change. I pinched harder, digging short nails into skin until the joint in my finger buckled. I felt the pain, and my skin bleached white before turning an angry red, but there was still no change in the world around me. 

I was still in a room I didn’t recognize. Fuck, I was still in a body I didn’t recognize. 

Fuck me sideways with a godsdamned fucking chainsaw. 

Right. Right! Not dreaming. So. Yeah. Coma? Were there rules for a coma? Was that just a different sort of sleep? Who could say- I couldn’t! God, I should have paid more fucking attention in cogs sci-

The senseless pondering distracted me from the wonderful prospect of hyperventilation. My breathing calmed. My eyes cleared. I hadn’t even noticed my vision swimming in the first place. 

Right. Ok. So. I had no idea where I was, no idea what was happening, and was fairly certain that I wasn’t dreaming. First order of business: figure out literally anything about anything. C’mon, kid, time to get your bearings. Look around, why don’t you.

The room around me was dim with early morning light. That much I’d noticed when I’d first woken up. A vanity and mirror took up much of the wall space to my left, and a single window took up the right. I could faintly see the outline of an arid suburbia through the gaps in the horizontal blinds. I didn't recognize the neighborhood. Two doors were inlaid in the wall facing the bed. One of them was a closet, maybe? The walls themselves were a pale purple. A large grey suitcase leaned against one of the doors. 

Well. One thing to do, then. 

I pushed myself out of bed, kicking sheets off of my legs as I went. I walked on wobbling feet over thick carpeting to the vanity.

I looked into the mirror, bracing my arms on the small table. I did not recognize the face that stared out at me. 

The hair was long and dark, hanging in thin curtains well past the shoulders. It framed an oval face. Wide forehead. Dark brown eyes, dark brown eyebrows. Lips that weren’t full, but fuller than what I was normally working with. Wider, too. A straight nose, longer than mine. A chin, smaller than mine. 

Feminine, and sort of pretty. Young. A teenager, maybe? Or, at least, a baby faced young adult. 

The face that wasn’t mine contorted into a familiar expression of utter confusion. I wear it better, I thought hysterically. 

A rapping on the bedroom door nearly startled me out of my skin. Which wasn’t my skin.

“Bella! Are you up yet?” 

It was a woman. Older. Was it the mother, aunt, guardian, of the teenager I wasn’t? Bella, apparently. I had no way of telling.

“Yeah-” my voice came out as a choked whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah, I’m up!” 

“Good! Phil wants to leave for the airport in an hour- finish packing!”

Who the heck is Phil? Who the heck are you? I thought desperately. The woman would’ve said 'your dad' if he was the teenager’s dad, wouldn’t she have? And on that note- 

Who the heck is Bella?

And then, horrifyingly, I realized I did vaguely recognize the face in the mirror. 

I had read the Twilight series once. A decade ago, I was ten, and my closest- read, only- friend at the time, Liz, was obsessed with the books. I’d taken them out from the closest library mostly so that I’d have something else to talk to her about, and then I had devoured them with the ferocity that only a lonely kid can. 

They were alright. Better than I’d expected, honestly. But not worth a reread for me. 

Romance had never really been my genre. 

But even my relative lack of interest was not enough to save me from Twilight’s cultural saturation. I’d been alive during the height of its popularity. I’d seen the Team Edward, Team Jacob wars, albeit from an outsider’s perspective. I could recognize Kristen Stewart. 

Even if it took me a second.

I turned back to the mirror, my - Bella Swan’s- eyes wide with horror. No. No. This was not happening. This was the stuff of childish fantasies and fanfic that people didn’t admit to writing. This wasn’t something that happened.

No, it couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t happening. Full stop. This was some weird coincidence. There was no way I’d fallen asleep in my apartment, only to wake up in Twilight. As Bella fucking Swan. There was no way. 

But it seemed equally unlikely that I’d fallen asleep as myself, and woken up as someone else. 

Nothing was off the table. 

I looked around the room, searching for a bag, a purse, anything. My eyes landed on a simple black backpack sitting at the base of the bed. I rooted around the pockets until my hand clasped around a wallet, pulled it out, and snapped it open with hurried fingers. There! 

An Arizona ID card for one Isabella Maria Swan, age seventeen. The face that stared up at me from the picture was the same that stared out from the mirror. 

I was Bella Swan. Presumably, I was in Twilight. 

Well.

My free hand went to cover my mouth as if to hold in sound. There was no need, my throat had already closed. This was impossible. This was impossible. This was-

I’d gone insane. It was the only explanation that worked. This shit didn’t just happen, so I must have gone insane. 

“Bella?”

A woman stood in the doorway to Bella’s room. Funny, I hadn’t noticed the door opening. 

She was short with fly away brown hair. I’d guess she was in her mid forties, but she had the skin of someone who’d spent too much time in the sun in her youth, so she might have been younger. She leaned against the doorframe, looking concerned in that particular maternal way. 

I realized quite abruptly that I was standing in the middle of what was, supposedly, my bedroom, still in pajamas, and clutching my ID with what had to be a look of terror on my face. I’d be maternally concerned for myself if I was her, too. 

I smiled shakily and gestured with the ID card. “Just making sure I hadn’t lost this,” I said. 

The woman’s expression crumpled further. “Oh, honey,” she said, stepping into the room. “You don’t have to do this, you know that, right?”

Ma’am, I have no idea who you are, or what you’re talking about. 

I swallowed and grasped around for an appropriately vague response, “I know,” I lied. “I’ll be fine, yeah?”

She looked doubtful. I didn’t blame her. 

“There’s still time to change your mind,” she said carefully. “I’m sure Charlie would understand.” 

Charlie. That name was slightly more familiar than Phil. Still didn’t know who the hell he was. 

Roll with it. 

I forced my smile into something softer. Hopefully something that seemed more genuine. “I haven’t changed my mind. Don’t worry about me- I’m a big kid now, yeah?” 

“But you’ll always be my little girl,” she smiled. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck raise, and I fought to keep the smile on my face in return. “Why don’t you get ready. We’ll have a family breakfast before you have to go.” 

I nodded once, and she ducked out of the room. I stood stock still for a moment, my arms at my side. Right. Right. A family breakfast. Weren’t Bella’s parents divorced?

Oh, right, that’s who Charlie was. Bella’s dad. In Forks. 

Oh, fuck. 

Forks.

**Author's Note:**

> God I miss Washington. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! This probably won't have a consistent update schedule, so sorry in advanced for that. 
> 
> This is my first published fic, so please be gentle with me : )


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